Recognize The Purpose Of Your Website

The purpose of most business websites is to drive sales. While successful sites engage, inform, and educate visitors, their end goal is to convert visitors into leads and leads into customers. In some cases, visitors may purchase tangible or digital products directly from the website, while in others they may engage in some way with the business, eventually purchasing products or services from the business.

If making sales is the end goal of your website, you must always keep this in mind. Too often this key point is forgotten in the quest for design features, boatloads of content and lengthy text descriptions of products and services. Don't forget the reason you're building a site in the first place.

Click-bait-y articles about the fall of UX can make designers anxious about their careers. But if you have been working in this industry for long enough, you have probably seen this happen before. From “webmaster”, to “information architect”, to “interaction designer”, to “UX designer”, we have always been able to adapt what we do and call ourselves – while maintaining our mission of creating meaningful experiences for people.

What we see now is not any different. Our field is maturing, budgets are increasing, and the design landscape is getting more complex and competitive. We can’t expect every designer to be the jack of all trades. We can't be doing our job in 2018 the same way we did in 2008.

As companies embrace digital and look to leverage their data, processes and products to create new value streams software is becoming more and more important. Being able to deploy to a variety of devices is key to creating a digital business; mobile, web and server are all common platforms for software and now even desktop is making a come back.

I’ve seen a trend recently; some companies are beginning to ask the question, if we are using much of the same code on different devices, why not re-use it?

The cross-platform economy is a phrase I think best describes how organisations can build a suite of re-usable and modular code that can be deployed to multiple platforms (web, mobile, server and desktop). It will allow the same code to enable integration across many customer touch points and integration systems.

Curious about how FinTech APIs can help globalize the world? Interested to learn more about technological innovation in a highly regulated and partnership-based industry? If you're an engineer considering a career in fintech, join us for an evening discussion with the engineering heads of three of the leading companies in the industry.

Our panelists will discuss both the opportunities and challenges of building APIs that access personal financial data. They will share perspectives from three very different fintech API companies, solving different problems at different company stages:

Most days, your goal as a developer is to design, develop and program awesome software. However, part of the job is also finding new clients, and you don’t want to be caught off guard by unexpected legal documents that come up while you’re establishing new clients.

The most common legal document you will be asked to sign when working on a website or app is a non-disclosure agreement (NDA). If you’re not sure whether to sign an NDA as a developer, this article will guide you to make an educated decision.

An NDA is a type of contract in which one party, typically called the receiving party, agrees to keep confidential certain information it learns from the other party, typically called the disclosing party. NDAs can also be mutual, whereby each party agrees to keep certain types of shared information confidential. Frequently, an NDA will specify that the project, such as the development of a new app, should not be discussed except with those who have also signed the NDA.

Earlier this year, the App Association calculated that there were 223,000 unfilled coding jobs in the US. Companies have started touting coding as the new literacy, almost a prerequisite to getting in the door. Last month, General Electric’s CEO Jeff Immelt announced that every new hire at the 305,000-person company will learn to code.

“It doesn’t matter whether you are in sales, finance or operations,” he wrote on LinkedIn on Aug. 4. “You may not end up being a programmer, but you will know how to code…. This is existential and we’re committed to this.”

The problem is no one has a clue how to actually teach everyone to code. Decades after demand for engineering jobs began to soar (and even including

No Deadlines For You! Software Dev Without Estimates, Specs or Other Lies

In Coding, Fast and Slow, I talked about one of the deepest challenges involved in writing software: the near-total inability of developers to predict how long a project will take.

Fortunately, as that post mentioned, I believe there is a way to work, where the software you write ends up being valuable, and the business people you work with end up being happy. And, critically, this way of working does not involve committing to estimates of how long work will take (which is good, because, personally, I suck beyond all belief at such estimates… even for work which I initially believe will take no longer than a single day).

Advanced website builders — the tools provided by Squarespace, Wix, Weebly, The Grid21 and more — produce websites that look and feel like they were designed and coded by humans. They’re also software as a service, which is a different business model than traditional, custom-developed websites. So, should companies use them? At some point, will they replace custom development?

In short, yes.

Self-serve website-builder platforms are quietly becoming very powerful. A lot of us write them off without much thought, but it’s time for agencies and custom development shops to pay attention. It won’t be hard to stay ahead of the builders… once we acknowledge they’re coming for us.

The web has continued evolving since its inception, as have those who have devoted their professional lives to working in and around this massive communication tool. We have had to roll with the changes, and like with any major environmental shifts, we have had to adapt.

During this shifting of our online existences, something quite interesting happened… interesting in a somewhat frustrating manner. The expectations of the client base, our colleagues and even our friends have risen to new, unreasonable heights.

Though this is not an isolated instance of schedule disrespect, we do understand that not every potential client or colleague is going to hold on to these

Redux has become one of the most popular Flux implementations for managing data flow in React apps. Reading about Redux, though, often causes a sensory overload where you can’t see the forest for the trees. This also holds for testing Redux projects.

As usual, we’ll start by iterating that there isn’t one right way to test your Redux project. We will present an opinionated flavor that we personally believe in.

One of the biggest motivations for testing is engineering velocity. It may seem that writing tests slows down the development process, but this perceived notion only holds in the short term. Without automated tests, we’ve noticed that our projects can only grow that much before our ability to deliver grinds to a halt.

AS THE HEAD of a newish design studio, I spend a fair amount of time writing proposals. And here’s how I like to do it.

I do it like a conversation, and that’s how we start: with phone calls and emails to one or two key decision makers, followed by a research period of about two to three weeks. And when I say research, what I’m really talking about — besides the usual competitive analysis, analytics, and testing — is even more conversations, but this time with a wider net of stakeholders and customers.

Some studios do this for free, and other studios only do it if the client has signed off on a huge project and paid the first big deposit. But we do this research for a fee. A small, reasonable, consulting fee. If the client then hires us to do the job, we deduct the research fee from the project cost. If they don’t, they’ve gained a lot of great information at a fair cost. (So far, they’ve never not hired us to go on and do the project.)

It's your first month at your new job, and you're worried you're on the verge of getting fired. You don't know what you're doing, everyone is busy and you need to bother them with questions, and you're barely writing any code. Any day now your boss will notice just how bad a job you're doing... what will you do then?

Luckily, you're unlikely to be fired, and in reality you're likely doing just fine. What you're going through happens to almost everyone when they start a new job, and your panicked feeling will eventually pass.

Just like you, every time I've started a new job I've had to deal with feeling incompetent.

Large amounts of new designs and feature requests landed on my lap today… I had to answer the question, “How do I prioritize all this new work???”

Immutable data structures and transformations to the rescue!

(I’m such a nerd but i love it…)

Create a task array from the comps & feature meetings: I’m going through the designs/features and creating a list of all the things I need to do to accomplish them.

Filter the task array by our current capabilities: Our designer who worked with business to nail down the new features wasn’t 100% aware of what our API could do. I need to go through each task and remove the items that are too difficult and add them to a “defer” list which, as the backend team works on it, can be added back to my current task array.